by Donna Kane
By the time we arrive, it’s late afternoon. The stock trailer is there, the horses inside loose but separated by gates according to who gets along with whom. They’ve been inside for nearly eight hours. They’re restless, jostling for position, the clattering of their shod feet against the metal floor amplifying the size of their bodies. Terry, the stock truck driver, opens the back door and he and Wayne, armed with halters, slip inside, then shut the door behind them. The clattering accentuates. It is as though Wayne and Terry are magicians going into a secret vault, the noise a kind of mysterious shuffling of a metallic deck, and then voila, the door opens, and one by one the horses leap out.
Please give me Hazel, is what I would pray those first few years. Please don’t give me Gataga or Tuchodi—they are humongous and way too spirited! We grab the lead ropes of the horses’ halters as they jump from the stock truck. We lead them toward a patch of trees and tie them up. Their nostrils widen, taut as rubber sealing rings, as they breathe in their new surroundings, glad to be out of the trailer but nervous, filled with a bristling energy.
After a few years, something in me said, Okay, I can do this. Gataga, I know you, and what I know is that at heart, you are a kind soul. But the act of leading a horse still feels like a trick to me, even at times a sort of showing off: See how I can handle the more energetic horses? Isn’t it something, the way they trust me? When all of the horses are out of the trailer and tied to the trunks of the aspen and spruce, we loosen their lead ropes so their heads can reach the ground to eat the flakes of hay that we break from the square bales we’ve brought. As we disburse the food, the horses whinny—Over here, over here! I’m starving!
We pitch our tents and spend the night in the old campground area, but sleep is restless. Wayne gets up several times to check the horses. Sometime near dawn—I’ve been dreaming so can’t be sure—I wake to Wayne’s hand on my thigh. It feels warm and solid, full of attention and hope, a kind of comfort edged with relief. We have not been spending time together, or, when we have, it’s been to balance books or cook dinner for the guests who’ve flowed in and out of our home.
“I wish you were coming with me,” Wayne will say, but after seven years, we both know, or should, that it’s not true. Who would stay home to keep the lawn mowed, the flowers watered and weeded? Who would relay the messages back and forth between Wayne and his clients? Who would host and feed those clients on their way up then back down the highway?
While the first leg of each summer’s expeditions has the added logistics of getting the horses—this year there are twenty-one—and their gear to the trailhead, getting guests in and out of each subsequent leg is like trying to solve a distance/time/speed problem. For example, two weeks from now, on a Thursday, Mary will drive into Rolla in her own vehicle. On Friday, John and Eric will fly into Fort St. John (45 minutes north of Rolla). On Saturday, Mary will head north to Fort St. John and pick up John and Eric at the Northern Grand. The three will travel two hours farther north to Sasquatch Crossing where they will pick up Melodie’s vehicle, which was left in the dusty parking lot two weeks prior from when the first set of guests rode in off the highway. John will drive Melodie’s vehicle and the three will convoy to Fort Nelson. On Sunday, these three, along with three more who have flown directly into Fort Nelson, will fly by bush plane into the head of the Prophet River for the second leg of the expedition. The guests from the first leg will fly out, including Melodie, and together they will drive Melodie’s and Mary’s vehicles back to Fort St. John. How will Mary’s vehicle get back to Fort Nelson?
The answer? Wayne needs me more in Rolla than on the trail.
But it isn’t just the yard and the expediting and the hosting and now Comet that keep me home. My father isn’t well. He hasn’t been for some time, but lately he seems to be getting worse.
A few years ago, the pain in my father’s hip became too much to bear, which must have been significant, because (a) my father rarely complained, and (b) he hated to go to the doctor. He finally did go, and the doctor discovered that my dad, at seventy-six, needed a hip replacement. They also discovered that his blood pressure was through the roof, and that it had likely been that way for a very long time. So along with the worn-out hip, my father had acquired congestive heart failure. In a matter of a few months he had a hip replacement and a pacemaker. These operations did not go well, and life as he’d known it—a life spent outdoors, farming and roaming the woods nearby—was over.
As soon as my father came out of his hip surgery, we could see a change. At first it was minor confusions, getting names of people mixed up. We put it down to the anaesthetic. With time, we told ourselves, he would improve. Then there were moments when he’d stop in his tracks as if he’d forgotten where he was. It happened swiftly. In what seemed a matter of weeks, he’d gone from sitting at my kitchen table, talking about politics and railroad subsidies, to forgetting how to fix a tire on his tractor. He’d always said, “Donna, if I ever get so I don’t know who I am, put a pillow over my face.”
By the summer of Comet’s wound, at the age of eighty-two, my dad was in full-blown dementia. It was getting harder for my mom to care for him. I hated to be away for more than a few days at a time. Doctors had done brain scans and confirmed that my father had, over the past few years, been having small strokes—TIAs, transient ischemic attacks—and with each one, he diminished a little more.
I lie there in the pre-dawn light, half asleep, listening to Wayne breathe, trying to imprint this moment of calm in my brain, hoping for it to become a memory that will sustain me for the next few months. I think back to our first summer together on the trail. I think of my family. I think too of the wounded horse.
It takes several hours to pack up in the morning, a slow building up to the moment when Wayne and his crew will ride off. After breakfast, the coffee cups and dishes are washed, stacked just so in the dish basin, the kettle and grills slipped into their respective storage bags, then put into the panniers. Tents and sleeping gear are laid out on tarps that will be turned into soft packs for the horses to carry. The horses are saddled, stirrups adjusted for their riders, adjusted again, demos here, demos there, the bridles put on. People make their lunches, then stow them along with cameras and binoculars in their saddlebags; they tie their rain gear and warm coats behind their saddles. With each passing day, this moving becomes more efficient. On the first day of the trail, the takeoff time is always near noon, but by the end of each expedition, the time will have shortened by several hours.
The string is packed in a particular order, having to do with which horse gets the heavier load as well as with how well behaved they are. The trick is to keep them all together, to not have one striking out before it is time. The less compliant pack horses are kept tied to trees until the end, but the others are free to mill around, their cargo swaying back and forth as they wait for Wayne to get on Bonus, to hear him say—drawing out the L—“Let’s go.” When the last horse is being packed, everyone needs to be in his or her saddle. Here is when someone might realize they need to pee or they can’t find their hat. Urgency rises.
“There’s a lot of moving parts,” Wayne says. And all those moving parts have to coalesce and move as one unit. If there’s a misstep—Wait! Kylo is still tied up!—and things pause, some of the horses will start off on their own and often in the wrong direction.
There is no time for a proper goodbye; that should have been done hours ago. Instead, it’s a quick wave and “I love you!” shouted over the backs of the horses and riders as they trot away. I watch them disappear into the trees. It takes a few moments for the quiet to descend, but when it does its weight is palpable. So much movement and so much energy and now all of it gone. The pack string and the riders are off on their adventure where, on each travel day, they will cover an average of ten miles, where even now they are discovering the trail, bonding together without me.
I stand in the empty campsite like a return
ee from Oz, the place gone back to abandoned. I walk around, looking for anything that might have been left in the flurry of the pack string’s leaving. I get in the Blazer, the back seat filled with a jumble of coolers and backpacks and water bottles and the unwashed pot from last night’s chili. I turn the key in the ignition and head back home.
Members of the artist camp, having set out at dawn, reach the alpine at mid-afternoon. sheila peters
Eleven
A Secret to Tell
Have you ever been lost?” I asked Wayne, when we first met. “No,” he said, “I always knew how to get back to where I started.”
“Are we lost now?” I asked, a few weeks later.
During that first summer at Mayfield, I was determined to not lose my sense of direction. That, at least, by god, was a skill I’d come equipped with. But what I think is the ridge, isn’t. Ahead is another rise, and now the hail has come and in sheets, and only now does it occur to me that when I’d climbed to the top of the mountain I should have looked across the valley and picked a far-off peak as a marker and positioned our camp below in relation to it. The marker I had eyed up, a particular boulder at the top of a rise, is now just one of a hundred erratics peppering the alpine, the hail obliterating the trail formed by caribou and sheep, filling the crushed-shale dent of the animals’ steps until everything is lost.
I know north from south. I know camp is north. But when I do reach the ridge and look down, the lake where we have camped, a tarn on the shoulder of the mountain, is gone. I can see a lake below, but not our bright-petalled tents. I must have walked too far east and here, can you believe it, is a second lake. How off-course am I? How far east could I have possibly gone?
Wayne cannot find out. That’s the first thing. If he does, it will be the second time he’ll have thought I was lost. And that bothers me, that he assumes I have no navigation skills. The first time Wayne assumed I couldn’t find my way through the bush was at his base camp at Mayfield Lake. We’d gone to get the horses. We’d studied the horses’ shod tracks along the trail, assessed the freshness of the horse droppings, stopped every now and then to listen for their bells and found the herd several miles northwest of Wayne’s cabin. They were milling around, eighteen in all this year, swishing their tails, fighting flies on a sandbar across a backwater channel of the Gataga River. We took off our shoes, our socks, our jeans and, balling our clothes into our arms, we waded across the stream. Once we’d made it to the sandbar, Wayne unhobbled the horses.
I was still getting used to riding a horse with a saddle, much less riding bareback. I watched the horses leap about, their shod feet big as saucers, huge Percheron crosses full of energy and vigour, and decided I’d rather be on foot. Once Wayne realized he couldn’t change my mind, he got on his horse Bonus and I waded back across. When we reached the other side, he got off and haltered Hazel, the quiet, über-compliant sorrel mare who, because of these traits, was most often stuck with the beginners who came on the trail. Wayne handed me her lead rope, the plan being that I would walk with Hazel behind Wayne and the rest of the horses would follow. When we began to wind through a patch of willow and poplar and Hazel could see that I didn’t know how to lead a horse, and that all of the other horses were crashing through the trees and passing her, she tried to shake me, and I let her. She showed a wild streak I hadn’t seen before and haven’t seen since as she bolted away, lead rope dangling, panicked at being left behind, knocking me into the willows, then thundering after Wayne and the rest of the horses. Stumbling back out of the brush, I found myself in the same patch of moss and rock we’d stopped at on our way to the horses. It was where Wayne had showed me the Pinguicula vulgaris, common butterwort. Amazing, is what I’d thought at the time, but in the eerie quiet of being left behind, the squat, no-frills meat-eating wonders took on a more sinister air.
Not for a moment did I think I was lost.
It is true that I ended up walking the way the crow flies, so there were times when I’d come to a deep creek and, anxious to get back to camp, and not knowing how far I’d have to travel up or down before finding a narrow place to cross, I would plunge right in. In one spot, the water rose to my chest and I had just the slightest nagging sensation that my choice might have been less than brilliant. And for sure once I reached the forest where the fire had passed through that spring, I struggled over deadfall I didn’t need to because I had forgotten exactly where the trail was, but as I clambered about, ashes glued to my wet jeans, stiffening them, I always knew which way I was going. Up through the burn I marched, past cup fungus letting off spores like ghosts of smoke, and when I reached the lake I turned left to the hand-hewn log cabin where Wayne wasn’t.
I remember thinking that somehow I’d beaten him back. But after a few minutes, another thought occurred. Maybe Wayne was looking for me. I left my red backpack by the door of the cabin as a sign that I was not lost, then headed back toward the burn. Partway through I heard a horse bell and I followed its sound, expecting to meet Wayne and the horses. But when I saw him, it was just Wayne. He’d let the horses go and was winding his way, back and forth, up and down the burn. My heart pulled a little when I saw his solitary figure swinging a horse bell, its ring a signal to me. On one hand, I was offended that he had so little faith in me, but on the other, I knew that if he’d just carried on, if he’d ridden to camp and left me behind, I might have wondered how much he cared. In that first summer together, adjusting to our new relationship, I’m sure there were times when we both felt utterly alone.
When I saw the tension in Wayne’s face relax into a look of wild relief I realized that while it had never crossed my mind that I might have been lost, for Wayne it had been a distinct possibility. And then another realization crept in—I was in a part of the world where I’d have to travel many miles on foot or horse across rivers and over mountain passes if I were ever to see the Alaska Highway again. And while it was true that I’d found my way back to Mayfield Lake, it was also true that the lake was the only landmark I knew. Wayne must have known this too.
I tried to snuff out my newfound unease. I didn’t know how to ride a horse or chop wood or do a diamond hitch, but by god I knew how to be in the bush. It is where I’d grown up, on the banks of the Kiskatinaw River. As a child, I’d often sleep outside where bears and coyotes roamed. And later, with my own children, we’d wander the wooded areas with a deep familiarity. Never, in my entire life, had I ever been lost. But until I’d met Wayne, I’d never really moved from the place where I was born. In fact, I’d lived in the same area so long I hadn’t even learned the names of the grasses or the flowers or the trees. It was as if the names weren’t necessary; they were a part of the body I’d been born into. I knew them in a different, more intrinsic way.
It’s occurring to me now, up in the alpine, the hail plastering me, and my shirt and jeans getting drenched, that the impulse to name just might originate in being lost. We name in order to be a part of an unfamiliar world, to gain a sense of control. I keenly wanted to be in control. But I wasn’t. My body was bolting just as Hazel had done. Everything it was doing—heart pounding, hands shaking—seemed out of my control. I am lost. I am. Calm yourself. You are not lost. Bewildered. Disoriented. Not lost.
When we’d gone to get the horses, and when we’d first taken off with me leading Hazel behind Wayne, he’d suggested something about trying not to get separated. I’d waved him off, slighted at being talked to like a child. This time, also, up on the alpine, as we waited for the others in our crew to assemble, Wayne had advised me not to head back alone. But I’d insisted, the storm barrelling toward us and me without a coat, and also, a part of me wanted to head back just to prove I could, to emphasize I had never been lost, not with the horses, not ever.
And where was Wayne anyway? On some rise I could no longer find, gathering up the rest of the crew. “Wayne,” I yell. “Wayne!” I call it out in one direction and then in another. He must have passed
me. Somewhere, at some point, we had to have been just a few feet apart; we just didn’t know.
The hail is coming down harder than ever, and for a few minutes the landscape disappears. It’s a mountain but it’s flat as a plain. I can’t see a fucking thing. They say getting lost in the mountains is harder than on the prairies because, in the mountains, there are so many landmarks to steer by. But you have to be alert to those landmarks, you have to watch for things you’ve seen before, you have to have established points of reference.
Wade Davis, in The Wayfinders, writes of the ancient Polynesians who could navigate their canoes in the dark, feeling their way through the water. They could tell the difference between waves created by local weather and those formed by distant pressure systems. They could tell by the way the waves lapped against the canoe which island they were getting close to. They paid attention. Whereas I am seized with a panic so wild and alive, I feel outside of myself. Oh, for the flat-faced axe blade of my own kind!
And then, out of the blue, in the worst possible way, I need to relieve myself. I duck out of sight, which is crazy because if someone were to see me it would mean I’d been found. Here, without any reference points, I am my own place. I am on my own. The only footing is me. And I don’t trust myself.
Pull yourself together, Donna. I do know which way is east and which way is west. For instance, if I walk far enough west, I should be able to look down and see Mayfield Lake. So that’s what I do. I walk west. I walk until I can see over the edge of the mountain, and there, down below—Mayfield Lake.
It is as if the lake is proof of me, the way my body settles. And then, because I know we travelled the game trail from Mayfield up the flank of the mountain, I slip down the scree, praying, though I don’t believe in God, that soon I’ll see the trail, and yes, I see it, the trail with hoofprints of the shod horses and here and there, day-old horse droppings. Thank you, thank you, thank you! And what kind of story might fly? Something to suggest I was never worried, that my body was never spooked? “Oh,” I will say, “I was never lost. I always knew where I came from.”